For African Americans, Obama’s presidency had been largely defined by his reluctance to engage with the ways that racial discrimination was blunting the impact of his administration’s recovery efforts. Obama has not shown nearly the same reticence when publicly chastising African Americans for a range of behaviors that read like a handbook on anti-black stereotypes, from parenting skills and dietary choices to sexual mores and television-watching habits.
There is something disingenuous in focusing on poor and working-class black people without any discussion about the ways that the criminal justice system has “disappeared” black parents from the lives of their children.
When Obama talks about absentee black fathers, he never mentions the disparity in arrests and sentencing that is responsible for the disproportionate number of missing black men. Few media discussions about Obama’s candidacy mentioned curbing the nation’s criminal justice system’s voracious appetite for black bodies: a million African Americans are incarcerated, and one in four black men between 20 and 29 are under the control of the criminal justice system.